Gaston: Julia plotting using gnuplot

Gaston provides an interface to plot using gnuplot.

Installation

Gaston requires gnuplot to be installed in your system. It has been tested with version 4.6

To install using Julia's packaging system, follow these instructions:

1. To install Gaston itself, run

   julia> Pkg.add("Gaston")

2. Then, load the module:

   julia> using Gaston

To install bypassing Julia's packaging system, follow these instructions:

1. Download the latest source, located at https://bitbucket.org/mbaz/gaston/downloads/gaston.zip. For example:

   $ cd ~/downloads

   $ wget https://bitbucket.org/mbaz/gaston/downloads/gaston.zip

2. Unzip the source files somewhere convenient. For example,

   $ cd ~/source

   $ unzip ~/downloads/gaston.zip

3. Add gaston to Julia's LOAD_PATH:

   julia> push!(LOAD_PATH,expanduser("~/source/gaston/src"))

4. Now you can use gaston by issuing

   julia> using Gaston

Documentation

To build the PDF documentation, cd into the doc/ subdirectory and type 'make help'. You can download the pre-build documentation from https://bitbucket.org/mbaz/gaston/downloads

A note on OSX

Recent versions of OSX removed support for the aqua terminal from gnuplot. Before attempting to use aqua in Gaston, open a terminal and run this command:

gnuplot -e "set term" | grep aqua

If nothing is printed, then you do not have support for the aqua terminal and should not attempt to use it in Gaston. By default, Gaston uses the wxt terminal. You can verify if your version of gnuplot supports it by issuing

gnuplot -e "set term" | grep wxt

Again, if no output is printed, your gnuplot does not support wxt. In this case, you need to run this command before any other Gaston command:

set_terminal("x11")

x11 is a fallback terminal with less bells and whistles than wxt or aqua.

If you want to save your plots to a file, please see this discussion first.

Demo

Gaston includes a demo that showcases its current capabilities:

julia> gaston_demo()

This function is defined in Gaston/src/gaston_demo.jl.

Tests

Gaston includes many tests, wich you can run to make sure your installation is working properly. To run the tests, do

julia> gaston_tests()

All tests should pass.